Autumn Highlights: what to watch out for in New York

More autumn highlights in London, Paris, Los Angeles and Berlin

El Greco takes centre stage in New York this autumn. Simultaneous exhibitions at the Frick Collection and the Metropolitan Museum of Art (which has teamed up with the Hispanic Society of America to mount its display) will commemorate 400 years since the artist’s death, and show off the city’s impressive holdings of the painter’s distinctive and influential works. Both shows open on 4 November.

That’s not all the Metropolitan Museum has up its sleeve, though. Its revamped entrance plaza, named after the principal benefactor David H Koch (who funded it to the tune of $65 million) is scheduled to open this autumn. So is ‘Cubism’, the Met’s first public exhibition of work from the extraordinary Leonard A. Lauder bequest. The collection of 79 priceless paintings entered the museum’s holdings in 2013, and was Apollo‘s ‘Acquisition of the Year’.

Long Island City’s SculptureCenter reopens on 2 October with a new director (Ben Whine, who moves over from his development role at the Guggenheim), an extended and revamped space, and a new group exhibition ‘Puddle, pothole, porthole’ organised by the curator Ruba Katrib with artist Camille Henrot.

The Cooper Hewitt Design Museum is also set to reopen this year (12 December) after a far longer renovation programme. The museum closed in 2011 to refurbish its historic campus and extend its available exhibition space by some 7,000 sq ft.

The sad news of Otto Piene’s death this summer will surely have a bearing on the reception of ‘ZERO: Countdown to Tomorrow’, which opens 10 October at the Guggenheim. The artist was one of the group’s founder members. In addition to showcasing the experimental work he, Heinz Mack and Günther Uecker created as part of it, the show charts its influence over subsequent generations of artists.

Similar circumstances surround the upcoming Sturtevant retrospective at MoMA (9 November). Sturtevant, who died in May this year, was quick to recognise the significant impact of mass produced and reproduced images on modern culture. Her deliberately provocative ‘repetitions’ of famous artworks, the first of which she made in the 1960s – flying in the face of copyright restrictions – proved extremely prescient.

Lead image: used under Creative Commons licence (CC BY-SA 3.0)